California timber industry may be a ‘piece of the puzzle’ to help reduce state’s raging wildfires

For years the State of California has destroyed the lumber industry. Most logging mills had to shut, because the State would not allow enough logs to keep them open. This has caused us to import lumber from Canada, adding to the cost of homes and making Californians unemployed—and destroyed the economy of many small towns in our northwest. At the same time, by not logging, the intensity of forest fires caused more damage than needed and could have been prevented. Government policy killed forests and homes, jobs, the economy and still doing its worst.

Despite opposition from some environmental groups, there’s talk of the need to remove more barriers to logging given that wildfires have become bigger, deadlier and faster moving. California’s timber laws are considered the most stringent in the nation.

“You’ve got a lot of fuel, you’ve got dead and dying trees, and a lot of hot weather — and it’s a recipe for disaster,” said Assemblyman Jim Wood of Healdsburg in Sonoma County, a member of the Senate and Assembly conference committee on wildfire preparedness and response. He represents a district with forested areas where October’s wine country firestorms ripped through neighborhoods and destroyed thousands of homes and claimed 31 lives.”

Lives lost due to government policy. Homes lost due to government policy. Through all this Jerry Brown has been d silent—and maybe be smirking—he plan to depopulate California is working. If not by taxes, bad regulations, terrible roads and schools, then by massive costs to fight fires due to government policy. He won—you lost.

Despite opposition from some environmental groups, there’s talk of the need to remove more barriers to logging given that wildfires have become bigger, deadlier and faster moving. California’s timber laws are considered the most stringent in the nation.

“You’ve got a lot of fuel, you’ve got dead and dying trees, and a lot of hot weather — and it’s a recipe for disaster,” said Assemblyman Jim Wood of Healdsburg in Sonoma County, a member of the Senate and Assembly conference committee on wildfire preparedness and response. He represents a district with forested areas where October’s wine country firestorms ripped through neighborhoods and destroyed thousands of homes and claimed 31 lives.

The U.S. Forest Service estimates that California has 129 million dead trees, most in the central and southern Sierras. Insects and drought are to blame for the high numbers.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to completely prevent forest fires, but I think we can mitigate the damage that they cause,” said Wood. “It’s a strategy and it will take resources. As a state, we haven’t committed as much to that, and that’s part of the reason we find ourselves where we are.”

‘Wake-up call for California’

According to the California Forestry Association, tree density in the Sierra Nevada is too high when compared with the region’s historical rates, creating an elevated fire hazard. It estimates there was an average of 40 trees per acre in the Sierras roughly 150 years ago but puts that number today at hundreds of trees per acre.

“Fire used to naturally go through the forest, and with 40 trees per acre, the fire will mostly stay on the ground, without creating a catastrophe,” said Rich Gordon, president and CEO of the association, which represents the timber industry. “This has been a wake-up call for California. We have to do something different to prevent these catastrophic fires.”

As Gordon sees it, large tree growth plus a history of fire suppression and reduced timber activity have created an unnatural setting of continuous fuels. Moreover, he said it’s led to too many trees competing for water during droughts.

“The industry is certainly prepared to assist and encourage and support the thinning of our forests,” said Gordon. “We can actually have more resilient, fire resistant forests if we thin them a little bit.”

Wood agrees that the selective removal of trees to reduce fuels and a more robust timber strategy in the state “can be a piece of the puzzle” to reduce the fire risk.

Wildland-urban interface

At the same time, the Democratic lawmaker is concerned about the fire risk for communities and subdivisions that are developed right up against wildlands or forests. The deadly Carr fire in Shasta County is the sixth-largest fire in California history and last month destroyed more than 1,000 homes — some in or near fire-prone wildlands known for oak trees and flammable chaparral.

An estimated 3.6 million California homes are built in what’s called wildland-urban interface, and more than 1 million are considered as “high or very high fire risk.”

The federal government is the largest owner of forest lands in California, holding about 57 percent of the roughly 33 million acres. Families, individuals, companies or Native American tribes own about 40 percent of forested land in California, while local, state and land trusts own the remainder.

Most of the timber companies operating in California today are family owned or part of family trusts. Those companies primarily get trees from their own lands by filing a harvest plan with the state for lumber production or through the sale of trees through federal forest programs, including some that allow them to salvage trees after forest fires.

California has no commercial timber operations on state-owned lands.

On Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown held a press conference to discuss wildfires and said there was a need for the state “to do planned burnings” as part of forest management and “to thin out the forest.” In May, the governor issued an executive order aimed at protecting communities from wildfire, and it included doubling the land actively managed through vegetation thinning, controlled fires and reforestation.

Push for regulatory relief

Meantime, the state forestry association wants to change rules and regulations to make it easier for private industry to thin forested land. The group also suggests increased logging could benefit rural areas in Northern California where poverty and job losses have been problems.

Gordon, the trade group’s CEO, insists the industry isn’t pushing for more clear-cutting of forested lands — a practice the Sierra Club opposes. Rather, he said, the industry advocates “selectively removing smaller trees on a landscape so that the bigger trees (which are more resilient to fire and store more carbon) can survive and do better.”

Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club California, said the environmental group is not opposed to what she calls “selective logging and those sort of things. We’re opposed to going in and unnecessarily disrupting the environment and doing forest management practices that will lead to worse fires, and some forest practices do.”

She said the practice of clear-cutting and planting trees all at the same time creates added risk for the forest because “you don’t have diversity. That makes them more susceptible to fires. Older trees tend to burn less and slower. So you want to have a lot of diversity.”

“Extreme environmental groups have for years stated that we shouldn’t thin our forests because of the benefits of carbon that is stored,” said Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach. “However, the carbon that is currently being released with these out-of-control wildfires is dramatically greater than we would have if our forests were responsibly managed.”

Bringing back timber industry

“The private sector is the answer,” he said. “We need to bring back our timber industry to clean up our forests for the safety of the entire state. The industry can ensure that our forests are sustainably managed and healthy.”

Allen, a former gubernatorial candidate, contends that Democrats share some blame for the fire risk due to policies over the years that have “regulated the timber industry out of California and denied access of Northern Californians to their own natural resources.”

Most of the lumber used in California construction today is brought in from Oregon, Washington or other sources. The cost to harvest timber in California can be substantially higher than other Western states due to regulations.

“It’s almost cost prohibitive currently for you to go in and remove any timber (in California),” said Gordon. “If we were to go in and do some thinning, we could produce more California product that could then be used by builders in the state.”

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Stephen Frank is the publisher and editor of California Political News and Views. He speaks all over California and appears as a guest on several radio shows each week. He has also served as a guest host on radio talk shows. He is a fulltime political consultant.

This is another case where stupid liberals have invoked their “thinking” on us and produced another calamity. The only thing they are consistent in is screwing up. Everything they do is nutty, expensive and life threatening!

State and Federal government are the poorest of stewards for any of our national resources and our environment. Lumber industry, would, indeed, better much better stewards than Gov Brown and his Brown Shirts. Ditto with water, air, and even the waste we generate. But Brown is the consummate environmentalist, tree hugging, liberal. I.e., He would save a tree at the expense of a human life. He would save a criminal at the expense of a tax paying Citizen whom he has called “freeloaders”. Kind’a tells you what his character is, doesn’t it?
Nope! Don’t trust Democrats to run anything, the state or the forests!

Governor, you are a Climate Change (CC) Propagandist hoping to control the people of California with this policy of insanity. I remember years ago reading about the deceit of the left as the Climate Change professors at London’s East Anglia University and Penn State University exchanged emails laughing about people being dumb enough to believe in their insipid theory.

You mock the deaths of our fire fighters in these latest fires blaming it on your Climate Change Propaganda. These deaths are the result of government policy, including the feds, the state and the counties, who refuse to take care of our forests in the name of “environmentalism”. The statement that cataclysmic forest fires are natural events belies the thought that so was polio, smallpox, and AIDS, but mankind overcame these diseases but added to the fire disasters.

You speak of drought and how it is killing the forest when in fact it is the number of trees “you” have allowed to grow up in the forest which requires three times the amount of water to sustain those same trees. The Bark Beetle must be laughing all the way to the next pine tree over your policies.

Governor, you know that we have about 300 tress to the acre in our National and State Forests when they should number 100. You know that the Spotted Owl cannot hunt in forests this dense along with creating difficulties for other species and these fires kill baby Bunnies and Bambi’s, Bears, Cats, Coyotes and so many more. Fire is a major industry supported by government/taxes. Forest management is mostly private businesses who log our forests. These folks know trees! They know that trees, both large and small, come out of the forest either as lumber or as smoke and ashes. Give COUNTIES the right and the money to care for our local forests. After all, look what you have done!!!

Part of the solution is not only thinning the forests but also preventative burning of underbrush. But the econazi’s would much prefer a 100,000 to 200,000 acre wildfire to controlled underbrush burns. Idiots.

Ca lumber corps used to manage the forest with skill, the enviro whackos came and the EPA intruded and the forest was primed for the match that would lite the fires to destroy towns and forest both…Ca is run politically by incompetents and malicious idiots….